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Texas Instruments’ Chips

One way to take advantage of GSM’s huge footprint–as well as the growth opportunities for the technology–is by acquiring shares of Dallas-based Texas Instruments. While Texas Instruments develops chips for “sensor” products such as air conditioners, heaters and automobiles, its biggest business today is in wireless. Texas Instruments puts its digital signal processors and other technology inside hundreds of millions of handsets each year.

Today, TI’s OMAP processors, as they are known, and digital baseband processors (essentially modems) provide multimedia application processing capabilities which are essential to 3G networks. The company also has its stripped-down, all-in-one processor, the Digital RF Processor. The chip, which is also known as the “Hollywood Chip,” should be a real winner for use in lower-end value handsets. The chip allows for digital television service on a handheld–a service that should become available in early 2006.

While Texas Instruments is doing a great deal outside of wireless (one of its biggest growth drivers is the digital light processor,a chip for high-definition televisions), wireless remains the company’s key driver of growth, and TI expects significant growth for 3G networks in China as well as new opportunities in providing voice-over-wireless local area network service, which would allow you to make wireless calls at work, for example, over your company’s network instead of through your cellular carrier. With demand for increasingly complex modems to handle the move from 2G to 3G networks; demand for multimedia, greater image processing and the need for mass storage devices; and the requirement that cell phones be able to connect not just to a cellular network but to Bluetooth technologies and Wi-Fi networks, TI’s wireless chips should have a robust future.